Local celebrity chef and restaurateur Traci Des Jardins, who stepped onto the national TV stage a couple years back making it into the final three on Top Chef Masters, sat down with friend and Mythbuster Adam Savage for an hour-long talk this past week in Savage's "Talking Room." They cover a bunch of topics, from all the hunters in her family (she tells the story of how her brother learned his lesson about recklessly shooting at blackbirds with a shotgun when he had to obey the family rule of eating everything you shoot), to her son and the growth of restaurant empire — she now owns and operates five local restaurants: Jardiniere, Public House, Mijita, The Commissary, and Arguello (the latter two both in the Presidio and opened last year).

Des Jardins first made a name for herself in the kitchen at Rubicon, one of the splashier and trendier SF spots of the 1990s, and she later went on to open the much beloved, opera- and symphony-adjacent Jardiniere in 1997.

It looks like this interview was shot nearly a year ago, when The Commissary was only two months old (it opened last May), and before the October opening of Arguello, and Des Jardins talks about the experience of having to work full time in a restaurant again to get The Commissary open after years of stepping back and delegating to her team. "Recently, opening a new restaurant, and I really dove into it working every night again, and I realized sort of how simple my life was when that was what I did. I didn't have a lot of friends, I didn't have social life. If people want to see me they had to come to the restaurant. Life was kind of simple and I kind of liked that. Now it's much more complex where I have social obligations and other obligations [that I have to deal with every day]."

She also talks about the grueling schedule of shooting Top Chef Masters, in which a whole season was shot in 23 straight days, and she was competing alongside best friend and L.A. chef Mary Sue Milliken.